


The King's Head

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: Llyfr Taliesin | Book of Taliesin, Mabinogion (Myth)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, The Troubles, genderswapped character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 03:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12832107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: Six of them in all: Glen and Manny and Terry and Gordon and Harry and Nick. Some of them bald, some of them greying, most of them running to fat a little, though Glen was the only one with a real belly. And of course the two others, sharing the place of honor at the end of the table. Still young and handsome in their crisp new uniforms, though the framed photos were beginning to fade a little behind the glass. Bryn Lear and Evan Nissen, who hadn’t made it back.





	The King's Head

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wererogue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wererogue/gifts).



They had the big table in the back, because of course they did. The King’s Head was that kind of pub, the village that kind of village. They’d probably been sitting there every Friday for forty years. She waved hello at them, saw a hand or two raised in return. Hung up her jacket, brushed her fingers through short brown hair, shook the rainwater from them as she walked to the back.

“Get you anything?” she called out.

“Pint of bitter.”

Glen didn’t look up. Big man, grizzled hair mostly white by now, a bit fatter than he had been last year.

“Pint of bitter,” she ticked off. “Manny?”

“Pru! Your mother know you’re coming into a place like this?”

She laughed.

“Your wife know you are?”

Manny being, of course, her stepfather. She’d actually suggested it, nine years old at the time and utterly tactless. Explained to their faces that it was obvious they liked each other, so they might as well start kissing at some point. The two of them aghast, then bursting into laughter. She hadn’t understood what was funny till she was nearly fifteen.

“Mine’s an IPA.” Terry held up an empty pint glass, and the rest of them chimed in with orders. Six of them in all: Glen and Manny and Terry and Gordon and Harry and Nick. Some of them bald, some of them greying, most of them running to fat a little, though Glen was the only one with a real belly. And of course the two others, sharing the place of honor at the end of the table. Still young and handsome in their crisp new uniforms, though the framed photos were beginning to fade a little behind the glass. Bryn Lear and Evan Nissen, who hadn’t made it back.

She walked up to the bar, got the orders in. Added a lager and a bag of pork scratchings for herself. Hadn’t really liked them before she was deployed out to Afghan. She preferred them to crisps nowadays. Maybe something subliminal seeping in, something about all that time surrounded by Muslims. Maybe just homesickness.

Terry got up to help carry the drinks. They handed them round, tore open the pork scratchings in the middle of the table.

“Fallen friends,” said Manny. A row of raised glasses, all around the table, her and all the old men.

“Fallen friends,” she repeated. Drank. The beer fizzy on her tongue, a little bitter. She looked at Bryn Lear and drank again.

The men on their second pints, Glen and Harry on their third already. Talking about nothing in particular, sports and the weather and the slow decline of their health. About what she’d expected, when they’d asked her, but she’d been touched anyway.

“Care for a game of darts?” She caught her stepfather’s eye.

“Tired of these old farts already?” He winked at her, pushed back his chair to get up.

“Old farts, is it?” Harry flashed a desultory V.

She and Manny walked to the dartboard together, set their glasses on the railing behind them.

“You didn’t have to get up,” she said. “If you wanted to talk to them.”

“They’re talking bollocks as usual. They’ll be at it all night. And old soldiers’ stories are all the same, aren’t they?”

“Are they?”

Manny squared up to the dartboard, squinting, his lips pressed together in concentration. He was fussily precise about the darts. Not very good, but careful. He flicked his wrist. Sixteen.

“You don’t mind keeping us company?” he asked. “I know we’re not your usual crowd. But with you being a soldier now, I thought you’d understand our little memorial.”

She nodded.

“I don’t mind, Manny. Really, I don’t.”

She took the next dart, stepped up to the line. She’d never gone in for lengthy aiming herself. Better just let them go before you got nervous. Double five.

“I never lost anyone I was close to, not like you were with Bryn and Evan. But I get it.”

“Bryn would’ve liked you,” said Manny. “He was an awful big brother, always had to be the best at everything. Bigger than me, stronger, used to rugger tackle me in the playground. I adored him, of course. He’d have made a fantastic uncle.”

“Yeah.”

“Not that I knew your mam back then.”

Flick. Twenty.

“Did she like him? My mam.”

“Ah…” Manny turned a dart in his fingers. “She didn’t see many people, after Paul died. It was a hard time for her.”

Pru nodded. She’d spent a few years in foster care, her mother “away sick” somewhere in England. In a hospital, she’d gathered. Mental problems.

“I don’t think she liked Bryn very much. Got on with Brenda, when they were both around.”

He stopped turning the dart, sent it with a strong, sharp movement into the board.

“Your sister?”

He smiled ruefully.

“Everyone liked Bren. Everyone. She was gorgeous, you know. Sophisticated. Long overcoat, French cigarettes. On the telly every so often, usually reporting from some war zone. You’d think people would have been jealous. But she had a way of making it all right, when she was back.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, she’d take you into a corner and talk. Conspire with you. She treated you like somebody special.”

Manny leant away, toward the rail, and took a long sip of his beer. Pru looked at the board, giving him a minute. He stepped back up, made a quick, ugly shot into the twos.

“I’m playing like shit tonight. Shall we pack it in, call it your game?”

She shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

They walked back to the table. Terry was telling another one of his stories. Something from the bad old days in Belfast, as far as she could make out. He’d talk the hind leg off a donkey, but she had to admit he was good at it.

“The Last Drop, right? Bloody hole off the high road, by the big housing estate, remember it?”

Glen snorts. “You were off your head going in there, mate.”

“Bryn’s idea.”

“Of course.”

“Put him in charge of the recce platoon, he thought he was James Fucking Bond. So we walk in there, muscle up to the bar, and stand there with our drinks, trying to act tough. Every man in the place looking at us out of the corner of their eye, right? Like a Western movie, with Bryn as John Wayne, only nobody stopped to tell Bryn, but John Wayne isn’t fucking Welsh.”

“So there we are, like a pair of farts in a jam jar, and after a minute or two, in come a couple of chaps from the local organisation. A big burly man in a donkey jacket, and a kid who looked about our age. Spotty little runt, swaggering around. The big man hangs back, and the kid walks up to us, and I figure we’re for it now, the little bastard’s going to start something and the big one’s here to finish it. And I just—”

Terry bent forward over the table, staring slowly from eye to eye. It shouldn’t have been as impressive as it was. For a moment, he looked ice-cold. Evil. He met her eyes and she cringed a little. She could see the rest of them shiver slightly as his gaze ran down the table. He leaned back again and laughed at them.

“So I’ve still got it, eh? You lot look like that runty Irish kid. He just stood there, trying to talk, and all he could say was ‘blu… blu…’ So Bryn necks his pint and pushes past him, like he’d cut in the queue at the supermarket, and we walk out of there and don’t look round, and half-way down the street we look each other in the face and we don’t say anything, we just sprint like fuck.”

“Bryn was a lucky bastard,” said Glen. “Used to say he was blessed, or he had a charmed life or something.”

“Used to,” said Terry, and they all looked at the picture at the end of the table.

“It’s like one day you look down and think, what’s holding the world up anyway? What’s underneath? What if it falls?”

“I spent years like that,” says Harry. “Used to sleep with a pistol under my pillow.”

“Why’d you give it up?”

“Sian wouldn’t have it. The dog woke me up one morning, I nearly…”

“That old collie of yours?”

“Dead now. Cancer, had to have her put down.” He sighed. “God, I miss that dog.”

The barman waved at them.

“Last call, gents. I’ll be closing up soon.”

“Mind if we stay on a bit?” asked Manny. “I can lock up after you go.”

“Well, I don’t usually do that.” He dithered. “But seeing as it’s you, Mr. Lear, and your memorial night too. You’ll remember to tidy away the glasses?”

“Good man. We’ll do that.”

There’s a chorus of affirmation.

“I’ll leave the keys on the bar. Anything to drink before I go?”

Nick pushes back his chair. “Get you another?”

“Eh, twist my arm.”

“Yeah, go on then.”

Pru thought about ordering a half. But you didn’t do that in the army.

“Another lager,” she said. “And here’s a couple quid for more pork scratchings.”

She went out to the lavatory, a little unsteady on her feet but still fine, basically fine. When she came back the barman was gone. They were singing: Terry’s solid baritone, Glen’s rumbling bass, Manny gamely trying for high notes he couldn’t quite hit. She didn’t know the song. Something sappy, something about a woman. They trailed off as she sat down again.

“Not your night?” She laughed.

“My night was in seventy-seven,” says Gordon.

“Was it?” Manny cackled. “What happened then, someone hold hands with you?”

“Now then, I don’t remember you getting around so much. Way I remember it, you went to every school dance with your sister.”

“Brenda,” said Glen. “Now, there was a woman for you. Lovely, lovely woman.”

“Pity what happened to her,” said Nick.

“The accident?” asked Pru.

“Accident? She topped herself, didn’t she?”

“Ssh,” said Manny. “We didn’t tell—”

He looked at Pru.

“You weren’t born yet, when it happened. And then you weren’t old enough.”

“Christ,” said Pru.

“Your mam and I—”

“Christ. Well. I’m old enough now. Let’s have it.”

She stared down the table. His eyes lowered to his glass, not meeting hers.

“All right. All right.”

He drank, swallowed.

“It was after what happened to Bryn and Evan. A year or two after. She’d been reporting from Derry and we were in Belfast, we hadn’t really been talking. And then she was back for the funeral of course and we told her all about it, said she had to get out of Ireland, but she didn’t.”

“Told her about what?”

“What?”

“At the funeral. What did you tell her?”

“How they died, like. That Ireland was dangerous.”

“She was a war reporter. In Derry. She must have known it was dangerous.”

“Yes, well, she didn’t realize how bad it was going to get.”

“Brenda. The war reporter.”

“It’s different—”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Pru! Calm down.”

“I had a man’s severed foot in my hands once.” No emotion in her voice, telling them this.

“Transport hit by a mine, and he’s screaming, screaming, where’s my foot, where’s my foot. So I held up his foot, showed it to him, here’s your foot, mate. And he calmed right down again. Now, what aren’t you fucking telling me?”

“Did he get his foot back again?” asked Glen.

“Did he bollocks.”

“Look,” Terry spread his hands, conciliatory. “We’d better just tell it.”

“It’ll kill Rhiannon,” said Manny.

“It won’t. Because she won’t tell Rhiannon, will she?”

Pru nodded.

“I never do, do I?” She snorted. “It’s why we get on together. We’re the tough ones. I joined up because of you, you know.”

Manny glanced at her.

“I wondered. I wouldn’t have told you to do it.”

“I didn’t do it to impress you.”

“Fine. Tell her.”

Terry looked up and down the table.

“You have to understand, nobody knew about Bren. They’d never have posted Bryn and Manny to Ireland if they knew. A family member— a sister— made them too vulnerable. But she used her married name, she was Brenda Mathers or something by then. Nobody knew.”

“And then Bryn started getting letters. Pictures of her, press clippings, you get the idea. Her husband and her little boy were in them too. No explicit threats, nothing graphic. It drove him crazy.”

“Had us watch the letter box for a solid week,” said Glen. “Nick here had to take apart the phone, look for bugs.”

“He was paranoid,” said Nick. “I got up in the middle of the night once to piss, and he was going through my things. Squeezing the toothpaste.”

“So then one day,” Terry went on, “We drove way out in the middle of the country. Out of Belfast. In between the towns it was all green, looked like a picture postcard. We used to fucking hate it. Every bend we went around, you thought, there might be a roadblock here. The locals were always watching you. They could put a block up anywhere and you’d be on it before you knew what was happening. But there wasn’t any roadblock this time. And we come to a little road that leads off into a pasture somewhere. Sheep and that. And Bryn says turn off, stop the van.”

“And then he looks over at Evan, dead calm, he says You little sod, who’ve you been telling about my sister. And Evan starts to say, I never, I never did, and then Bryn hits him. And he starts to talk again and Bryn throws him out of the van and hits him again. And finally Glen grabs Bryn by the shoulder and pulls him off.”

“I think if Evan had brazened it out, we’d have believed him. There wasn’t a lot of evidence, they were careful, the IRA. Bryn had gone snooping and spying but he hadn’t really seen anything, he’d gone off half-cocked. But Evan—”

“He was a fucking idiot,” says Glen.

“Don’t,” says Manny.

“He was.”

“He was. We all were. Just— don’t.”

“He couldn’t brazen it out, not quite,” Terry went on. “He was only eighteen.”

“He gave up just enough detail that none of us had any doubt at all of what he’d done. And then when it was too late, he shut up, and Bryn had to beat the rest out of him. We all watched him do it. We leant up against the side of the van, in the middle of that picture postcard landscape with the sheep watching us, and finally Evan broke down and gave us an address.”

“Right lads, says Bryn, saddle up, and we look at Evan, what, are we getting him back in the van with us or what, and Bryn shoots him. James fucking Bond.”

“I threw up,” said Harry. “Nick and Glen pulled him back in the van with us, we couldn’t leave him out there, but then we lay him on the floor in the back, and just looked at him, all the way back to Belfast.”

“I wanted to throw up,” said Manny. “I couldn’t though.”

Terry went on. “We drove in dead silence, back down past those big crumbling housing estates looming over everything. And Bryn took us into a little alley that had ‘ambush’ written all over it, pulled us up to a little run-down council house. And Bryn says, this is about my sister so I’ll go in first.”

“She’s my sister too, says Manny, and Bryn just looks at him and he steps back. So Bryn goes in first, kicks open the door like in the films, and it’s the man with the donkey jacket in the front room, the one from the pub. Then there was a lot of shooting. I don’t know who was where, really. I didn’t hit anyone. I think there were three of them in all. Bryn killed the man in the jacket, and there was another body on the floor but I don’t know who hit him. The third one legged it out the back. I suppose he went for reinforcements. Anyway they were all set up for us when we came out, snipers in the windows. That was when they hit Bryn. We picked him up and ran for it, back in the van, back to the high street, I was going like hell. I thought we were going to make it.”

“He was talking for a minute,” said Nick. “But there was too much blood. Way too much.”

“It was all over the floor,” said Glen. “Like paint. I’d never seen that much blood.”

He looked sad, terribly sad. A hard old man, face like a butcher’s block, and Pru wanted all of a sudden to touch him somehow, put her arm around him, but she knew she couldn’t, soldier or no. She’d have to be old to touch him.

“We blamed it on an ambush. A roadblock, just like we always worried about. I think the Colonel winked at us. Those were the bad old days, the Paras used to just shoot men in the street, claim they’d resisted.”

Pru looked at the photographs at the end of the table. Two young men in uniform, green as the leeks in their caps. Smiling.

“And Brenda?”

“There was a bomb the year later. Under a car. Got Mathers and her son. She kept thinking about it, said it was meant to be her.”

“Manny,” said Pru. “I’m so sorry.”

“Just don’t tell Rhiannon,” he said.

Silence hung over them.

“Well,” said Harry awkwardly. “Well, I shouldn’t stay. Sian will be wondering.”

She’d be asleep by now, they all knew. Who’d sit up for the likes of them? But they pulled themselves to their feet. Joints creaked, hands fumbled with caps and jackets, drunk arms snaked into sleeves.

“All right then,” said Harry and slipped out the door. Cold air in his wake. Then the rest of them.

Pru looked back for Manny. He’d been stacking the empty pint glasses behind the bar. He went back for the photographs, slipped them into his coat.

“We’ll need them for next year,” he said, a little apologetic.

She looked at him, head tilted. “Still?”

“He was my big brother,” he said.

She patted him on the shoulder. They walked out into the rain together, splashing through the empty streets toward home.

**Author's Note:**

> "Now the seven men that escaped were Pryderi, Manawyddan, Gluneu Eil Taran, Taliesin, Ynawc, Grudyen the son of Muryel, and Heilyn the son of Gwynn Hen...
> 
> So they cut off his head, and these seven went forward therewith. And Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw, in Talebolyon, and they sat down to rest. And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them. "Alas," said she, "woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!" Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw...
> 
> And at the close of the seventh year they went forth to Gwales in Penvro. And there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the ocean; and a spacious hall was therein. And they went into the hall, and two of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, that which looked towards Cornwall. "See, yonder," said Manawyddan, "is the door that we may not open." And that night they regaled themselves and were joyful. And of all they had seen of food laid before them, and of all they had heard of, they remembered nothing; neither of that, nor of any sorrow whatsoever. And there they remained fourscore years, unconscious of having ever spent a time more joyous and mirthful. And they were not more weary than when first they came, neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there. And it was not more irksome to them having the head with them, than if Bendigeid Vran had been with them himself. And because of these fourscore years, it was called "the Entertaining of the noble Head." The entertaining of Branwen and Matholwch was in the time that they went to Ireland.
> 
> One day said Heilyn the son of Gwynn, "Evil betide me, if I do not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it." So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber Henvelen. And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the fate of their lord."
> 
> This isn't really a Llyfr Taliesin story but more of a story with Taliesin in it. It does have a quote from one of the poems somewhere, and the story about the Irish boy who can only say "bluh, bluh" is sort of inspired by the story about Taliesin enchanting Maelgwn Gwynedd's court bards.


End file.
